Missing the gorilla

Many of you will be familiar with the video where two teams are throwing basketballs to each other and, in the middle of the match a man in a gorilla suit walks through the middle – but many people fail to notice because of a phenomenon called inattentional blindness. We often don’t see things that are obvious because our attention is elsewhere. If you haven’t seen the video look here or, a different example here

Drew and Wolfe recently conducted a study of inattentional blindness with radiologists. They were impressed by the skill shown by such professionals in their ability to detect significant shapes when starring at fuzzy images on an X-ray. It gave them an idea. Drew and Wolfe placed images of a man in a gorilla suit on a series of slides that radiologists typically look at when they’re searching for cancer. They found that 83 percent of the radiologists missed it! See here.

The original researchers, Chabris and Simons were originally inspired to conduct their research by a real life incident of a mistaken eye-witness account, see here.